Don't Sweat the Aubergine

tips.
    Herbs: tarragon is particularly good with chicken. Or thyme, or basil. Add them to the sauce when it is ready.
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ACCOMPANIMENTS
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    You shouldn’t want fried or roast potatoes with a creamy sauce: that gives you two kinds of mouth-coating fat to eat and digest. It’s an indication of the crudity of my taste that I’m sometimes happy to face this combination.
    Boiled new potatoes are ideal; if you’ve got plenty of sauce, boiled maincrop potatoes work well too. Mash ( see here ) or gratin dauphinois ( see here ) is nice if the sauce does not include cream.
    If you’ve eaten a starter including starch, you could leave out the potatoes and go simply for a green vegetable, or perhaps a ratatouille ( see here ).
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WHY YOU DO IT
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    1 • Open pan . Conscientiously sticking to the Olney ‘no cooking the sauce with the chicken’ rule, how are you going to make sure that the chicken is cooked through, rather than just browned on the exterior? Olney suggests transferring it from the frying pan to a covered casserole, and finishing it in that. Richard Ehrlich recommends a sauté pan with straight sides and a lid. You brown the chicken, then lower the heat and cover the pan.
    My method above comes from
Keep It Simple
by Alastair Little and Richard Whittington. It also has a satisfyingly pure quality: the chicken is simply sautéed (unless you insist that the term, derived from the French verb meaning to jump, involves moving something around a frying pan), not stewed or steamed. On the downside, the juices it exudes evaporate, or get poured away with the fat. If you decide to cover the pan, fry the chicken first in only a dessertspoon of oil, so that the juices that accumulate in the covered pan are not too oily. You do not want to pour them away. Reduce them, if necessary, in a saucepan. If you’re using alcohol or vinegar, remove the chicken briefly to a plate, pour the alcohol or vinegar into the now-dry sauté pan, turn up the heat, and bubble to reduce by about half. Tip this liquid into the sauce in the saucpan, return the chicken to the sauté pan, cover it to keep warm, and finish the sauce in the saucepan with cream, stock or garnishes, as above. (You wouldn’t be able to reduce the wine/vinegar so efficiently if you added it to the saucepan liquid.)
    You could cook the chicken in the oven, and make a sauce in the roasting tin. But that is roast chicken with gravy.
    2 • Is it cooked? If you’re not sure, put a skewer into the thickest part of the thigh. Juices will run out. They should be clear. If there’s any trace of red in them, carry on cooking.
    3 • Curdling cream . In my experience, good double cream does not curdle in these circumstances. Delia Smith writes somewhere that crème fraîche never curdles; that is not my experience. Factory-made crème fraîche curdles when I cook it, without fail. But rich, thick, and much more delicious farm-produced crème fraîche never does.
    Cream goes from runny to stiff quite quickly, so keep an eye on it. Having some extra stock, to thin the sauce if necessary, is useful. Don’t add any more alcohol: if it is not subjected to a proper reduction, it will impart a horribly raw, acidic flavour.
    4 • Splitting butter . Butter added to boiling liquid will immediately separate into its constituent parts of fat and water. Let the sauce cool a little, and you have a chance of allowing the butter and liquid to blend into a creamy, rich emulsion. Don’t heat it again.
Other sautés
    Fried steak with a sauce made in the same frying pan ( see here ) is, of course, a sauté of this kind. You may have had it prepared at your local restaurant by a waiter with a small burner, a bottle of brandy and a smarmy manner. To do it at home, you need a gas cooker, a frying pan that you can manipulate easily, and some of that waiter’s confidence. Fry the steak, pour in the brandy, turn up the gas, and tip the pan so that the flame hits the brandy and ignites it. Watch out. When the flame dies down, pour in cream, and remove the steaks immediately, even if you want to bubble the sauce a little longer to thin it – the meat will toughen quickly if it stews.
    However, that’s if you want to show off. The sauce will work just as well – and may be nicer – if you bubble the brandy in a separate pan to reduce it before adding it to the steak ( see here ).
    You can also treat veal steaks and pork tenderloins in this way.
Frying and grilling
    Meat fried or grilled